More real harm has been done to art in recent years by indiscriminate talk about Form than has been due to any other type of philistinism. The habit belongs, to be sure, to the Higher Philistinism—it marks those whom Nietzsche called Culture Philistines—but it is none the less anti-artistic, for the emotion behind it is almost always a false and ignorant superiority. As for the damage done, it could be demonstrated by simply pointing to the artists who have either been hindered by critics’ objections to their form or—worse still—who have suppressed their true instincts in deference to this vague but menacing criterion.
Form is necessarily, inevitably, the creator’s chief concern in any art: the artist does nothing but shape material things, even when as a dancer, singer, or actor he uses his own body as a plastic substance. Hence the artist is alert to opinions about his forms—which are his works—and by extension he responds to criticism about what has come to be called his Sense of Form, as if it were a separate faculty used in only one department of his work. To the choosy connoisseur, it may seem very knowing to say in a depreciatory tone: “Ah, yes but formally—;” or: “Very moving, I admit, but I find the architectonic somehow not—;” the truth is that such judgments betoken little more than airs and graces mixed with current critical cant.
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